How inflexible is the attentional bias toward recently selected locations?
Daniel Tolédano, Dominique Lamy · Journal of Experimental Psychology Learning Memory and Cognition · 2025
trials where only the to-be-reported letters appeared. We measured PoL on probe reports when the task context repeated (search → search-probe sequences) and when it changed (search → probe sequences). We found PoL to be insensitive to task changes, indicating that attention is proactively guided to previously selected locations by default, even in variable task environments. We then examined whether expectations about the upcoming task modulate PoL by inverting the task probabilities (2/3 probe trials and 1/3 search trials) in Experiment 3 and by informing participants with 100% validity as to what their next task would be, in Experiment 4. We found PoL to decline sharply as the expectation of a task change increased. We conclude that PoL is proactive but flexible. We discuss two possible mechanisms to explain these findings: proactive attenuation and proactive retrieval, both of which entail that priorities from previous selections are reduced as a by-product of participants' reconfiguring their task set. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).